So the weekend is over, Ireland won out over England, it was fantastic in a cup final type of way. We narrowly won a match which we should have won comfortably but a Triple Crown is still sweet. I’m so happy we won, I backed Ireland heavily so I was shocked that it needed a last minute effort to win. Last year I demanded Eddie leave the Ireland coaching job and unfortunately all the problems I had still remain.

On the always excellent irishrugby email group some posters made excellent posts on the the match so I’m going to summarise them here.

Firstly Andrew Jagoe made some excellent points. I’m in full agreement with him.

Michael asked some time ago whatconstituted success for Ireland, personally winning the triple crown and defeating the English at Twickenham no longer do it for me. Yes, it makes my life more enjoyable as I go to work with my England supporting colleagues but as a concept it has more to do with life pre 1990 than 2006. When the triple crown concept was born there were four teams and it meant a grandslam. It continued to have some meaning in the true amateur days when I started watching. What I would like is at least one championship and a semifinal spot at the World Cup and that will necessitate turning over one or more from France, England, SA, Australia and New Zealand. We are probably no closer that goal than we were when Gatland was in charge.

Indeed Andrew, I’m sick of finishing 2nd, we’ve done it far too many times for my liking. Worse than finishing 2nd is the fact that regularly we finish 2nd just because we can’t score points. If we had got 10 more against Italy, Scotland and Wales we’d have won. How painful is that!

Next up Myles threw his opinions out there.

I had four major issues with this squad selection. MOK, Murphy, Easterby & JOC………….. All four almost cost us the game yesterday. MOK was dire, we were screaming for him to be replaced prior to Borthwick’s try, yet he had to be exposed in such a manner before our “crown waving” leader grew some balls, the fact that Eddie actually made a non-injury substitution in the 53rd minute shows how appalling MOK was playing. Play 5 games in the 6N perform well in one, coach is happy.

Murphy continues to rack up huge figures in the ball carrying stats, yet compared to the likes of Leamy who did most of his carries from the launching pad of a retreating scrum, Murphy’s seldom if ever get within 10m of the gainline. When he does join the line he seems very worried about where the hit might come from and THAT is the main reason for some of his woeful passes when seemingly under no pressure, his coach calls them offloads yet there isn’t a member of the opposition within six feet of him????

Easterby, for all his honest toil does not have the skill level or athleticism to play the type of game we appear to pursue. He looks adequate when the opposition are looking for contact, he will tackle all day……but so too will the much vaunted Scottish backrow. If there was a case for punting Foley, then Easterby should have gone long before.

JOC demonstrated why he is so well thought of in the English Premiership, he would have been totally at home playing for England, slowing ball illegally, coming in from the side and giving the opposition penalty kicks. A typical headsdown player, all balls and kamikaze and no bloody vision at all. His selection on the bench made us look fragile, his introduction when Leamy got injured just about finished us. If we are to have a prayer on our summer tour we must get all 4 backrow players in the squad correct, from the correct balance of the starting trio, to the boy on the bench.

I thought in particular that it was an excellent summation of the problems with Johnny O’Connor. On Malcolm O’Kelly his time should have been up 3 seasons ago but disgracefully he’s still there. Donncha probably isn’t the answer either, the answer is Mick O’Driscoll.

Finally for another opinion on things have a read of this. Of course if you disagree with the opinions of the email group we’d love to have alternative opinions!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 20th, 2006 at 12:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.